980 The Zoologist— November, 1867. 



the roughest lava, broken here and there by sandy bays, stretch along the 

 shore, and the island consists of an irregular series of conical hills of 

 various heights, among which towers Green Mountain, 2800 feet high, 

 whose summit is crowned with trees and green fields, and offers a strong 

 contrast to the other hills, which are reddish or brown, according 

 to the colour of the ashes and cinders of which they are composed. 

 The settlement of George Town is entirely naval in its character, being 

 formed of a number of departmental officers and of marines, who are 

 all borue on the books of H.M.S. " Flora," 40 guns, which lies off this 

 place, and whose captain is styled the "Captain of the Island." 

 Everything is conducted with the strictest reference to naval disci- 

 pline, and the island is nothing more nor less than a ship ashore. 

 The landing-place is very indifferent, mere steps cut in the rock, and 

 therefore entirely inaccessible iu bad weather. It is well known that 

 the great waves of the Atlantic often set in upon the rock in the form 

 of rollers, even in fine weather, and it can never be predicted when 

 they may make their appearance ; but whenever they do so all com- 

 munication between the ships and the shore is cut off, except by 

 signal. It is one of the duties of the master of the "Flora" to direct 

 a flag to be hoisted on the signal-hill when this state of things occurs, 

 and that is pretty frequently. 



As our stay was to be limited to one day I was thankful that the 

 weather was calm and the sea permitted us to land, and having done 

 so I bent my steps in the direction of South-West Bay, with the 

 intention of visiting " Wide-awake Fair," and at the same time ex- 

 ploring some of the geological features of this remarkable island. 

 The whole of Ascension is an erupted mass, the antiquity of which 

 can only be judged of by the worn condition of its surface, but it is 

 entirely the product of a once-active but long-since extinct volcano. 

 Green Mountain, the culminating point, is probably the parent cone, 

 around which a great number of secondary cones and craters are 

 clustered, the rough trochytic lavas of which run sloping to the beach 

 round the greater part of the island. 



One or two tolerable roads have been formed, which greatly save the 

 labour of walking in a country where the surface of the ground is 

 heaped with rough and sharp-pointed cinders, which look like the pro- 

 duct of a myriad furnaces, and to which the "black country" of 

 Staffordshire is a trifle. From these arise conical hills of a reddish 

 colour, covered with fine ashes, which crackle under the feet, and 

 from out of which peep the rounded overhanging ledges formed by 



